LCA 2010 Thursday Keynote – Glyn Moody

Glyn Moody – Hackers at the end of the world. Rebel code is now 10 years old… 50+ interviews over a year – and could be considered an archaeology now :) I probably haven’t down the keynote justice – it was excellent but high density – you should watch it online😉

Glyn talks about open access – various examples like the public library of science (and how the scientific magazine business made 30%-40% profit margins. The Human Genome Project & the ‘Bermuda Principles’: public submimssion of annotated sequences. In 2000 Celera were going to patent the entire human genome. Jim Kent spent 3 weeks writing a program to join together the sequenced fragments on a 100 PC 800Mhz Pentium processor. This was put into the public domain on just before Celera completed their processing – and by that action Celera were prevented from patenting *us*.

Openness as a concept is increasing within the scientific community – open access to result, open data, open science (the full process). An interesting aspect to it is ‘open notebook science’ – daily writeups, not peer reviewed: ‘release early, release often’ for science.

Glyn ties together the scientific culture (all science is open to some degree) and artistic culture (artists share and build on /reference each others work) by talking about a lag between free software and free content worlds. In 1999 Larry Lessig setup ‘Copyright’s Commons’ built around an idea of ‘counter-copyright’ – copyleft for non-code. This didn’t really fly, and Creative Commons was setup 2 years later.

Wikipedia and newer sharing concepts like twitter/facebook etc are discussed. But… what about the real world: transparency and governments, or companies? They are opening up.

However, data release != control release. And there are challenges we all need to face:

GFinancialC “my gain is your loss”. Very opaque system.

GEnvironmentalC “my gain is our loss”

Glyn argues we need a different approach to economic governance: the commons. 2009 Nobel laureate for Economic Sciences – Elinor Ostrom – work on commons and their management via user associations… which is what we do in open source!